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VideoFort featured in PR Week

VideoFort featured in PR Week

Recently, VideoFort was selected in PRWeek’s monthly company spotlight. VideoFort customer Conservation International provided an in depth interview as to the benefits of the VideoFort service.

When asked how VideoFort helps Conservation International serve its business needs, Peter Stonier senior director of visual storytelling replied, ” Conservation International scientists identify the most sensitive areas of the planet that are the most important to keep in tact to keep our biosphere healthy and maintain our life support systems. A lot of those places tend to be around the equator, such as rain forests and rich reef ecosystems,so that’s where our projects are.

We’re tasked with making films on the ground in locations where we have projects to document them to show others and scale what works in one project to a global best practice.

We recently did shoots about water conservationprojects in Suriname and Guyana in the north of South America. Fifteen percent of all the world’s fresh water comes from an area known as the Guyana Shield, which includes these two countries and parts of Venezuela and Brazil.

So we go there and create a film that shows people in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world how this water conservation project is working. Traveling to remote locations to film is costly. In fact, it can be much easier to get from our headquarters in Washington, DC, to the country we’re going to than it is to get from the capital of that country to our project location, which might be in the middle of the jungle or under the ocean. And the shoots are logistically complicated and can be expensive.

Before VideoFort we’d shoot footage and do interviews on the ground and then go back for aerial shoots, which can cost $40,000. Sony funds our work through the Visual Storytelling Alliance, but there’s a cap on our budget so we often need to raise additional money specifically for an aerial shoot.

VideoFort had all the aerial footage we needed for the Suriname and Guyana project. We subscribed and got all the Amazon aerial footage we needed. Given this particular story, we didn’t need these shots be that specific so VideoFort saved us an enormous amount of money and effort.

Generally, in the past when we went to a location we’d do a beauty and b-roll nature shoot in addition to our story shoot. The more we can use stock footage for the beauty and b-roll shots, the less money and time we have to spend on it.

VideoFort’s model has us thinking about upcoming projects so we can download what we might need. For example, we have an upcoming overview piece on Conservation International with Harrison Ford. Climate change will be part of it, so we’re going to need shots of polar bears and ice caps. I know for sure that we don’t have the money to go and film those, so we’re downloading those assets now from VideoFort.”

When discussing the main benefits of VideoFort, Peter responded, “Really good, high-quality footage. The ratio of quality to price is the best I have ever seen in the world. When we first found VideoFort, we kept looking at the site over and over to make sure we understood it correctly because the quality is so fantastic for the price. From other places just one shot might cost you $500 with limited use, and it definitely wouldn’t cover broadcast. VideoFort makes production time faster and more efficient, and therefore saves us money. You don’t have to download an offline comp version and then make the decision about what you want to buy and then swap it out. Right off the bat, you can work with something that’s high quality.”